


musings at 1:56 am

by peterpan_in_neverland



Category: Never Have I Ever (TV)
Genre: F/M, and couldnt come up with anything else, except its write tired dont edit and hope for the best, i mean i write things without a plan, it is really just me playing around, this is my version of write drunk edit sober, title because that is the time i started writing it, when i say i write things without a plan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:26:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29667261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterpan_in_neverland/pseuds/peterpan_in_neverland
Summary: “Who is this?” he whispers, and plays a low chord, high quarter notes layering over it, and she chuckles, a smile lifting up her lips and her dimples.“It’s Beethoven— Piano Sonata No. 14,” she answers, tapping at the keys. If she looks at them closely, she can see the body of her harp stretching out along it, and she knows which key is which, just like she knows which string is which, and she has a sudden and absurd desire to lift the lid of the piano to look at the hammers and strings. To watch them strike and reverberate as he plays.“This?”“Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minour,” she answers, “Chopin.”He does not say anything this time, just switches to another melody, and she rolls her eyes. “It’s Mozart’s Fantasy No. 1 with fugue in C majour, and the fact that you chose to prove your point with classic pianists just proves that you’re a pretentious asshole.”“That is not the point you asked me to prove.”“Yet, here you sit,” she says, playing the opening notes to Für Elise, “proving it.”--OR; Ben and Devi explore the domino effect
Relationships: Ben Gross/Devi Vishwakumar
Comments: 2
Kudos: 45





	musings at 1:56 am

**Author's Note:**

> This had NO plan. I just put down words, and the way it turned out is the way it turned out! I kinda like it, but I also have a complicated relationship with my conceptual fics. But, it is done, and I wrote it, and now I am posting it-- posting twice in one day-- because that is who I am now, apparently (thank you for encouraging me to post twice in a day, Bee)
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

“D’you ever think about permanence?” Devi asks, watching the finger-dancing piano melody that Ben is playing, his head tipped low, shaggy curls in his eyes and fingers spread out. He plays a chord that makes her ribcage shake, a vibrato of epic proportions. Shrugs. Does not stop playing. “Humans are fleeting, yeah? Impermanent. But the Colosseum still stands. How impermanent are we, really?” 

“As impermanent as we want to believe we are,” Ben says, pulling his hands away from the keys weakly, his fingers bumping and recreating clashing chords. “Which is, not at all.” 

She plays an abandoned church kind of chord, and says, “prove it.”

He looks at her— looks at her like he has been given a challenge, a test, like he has picked dare— and smirks, turning back to the piano and laying his hands over it.

_ His hands remind her of something special. He does not have pianists hands but he has a pianists mind and that more than enough makes up for it, more than enough makes up for the bone structure he does not have and she can forget that easily enough when he plays something, something she likes, something he has memorized, something he plays with his eyes closed.  _

“Who is this?” he whispers, and plays a low chord, high quarter notes layering over it, and she chuckles, a smile lifting up her lips and her dimples. 

“It’s Beethoven— Piano Sonata No. 14,” she answers, tapping at the keys. If she looks at them closely, she can see the body of her harp stretching out along it, and she knows which key is which, just like she knows which string is which, and she has a sudden and absurd desire to lift the lid of the piano to look at the hammers and strings. To watch them strike and reverberate as he plays. 

“This?” 

“Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minour,” she answers, “Chopin.” 

He does not say anything this time, just switches to another melody, and she rolls her eyes. “It’s Mozart’s Fantasy No. 1 with fugue in C majour, and the fact that you chose to prove your point with classic pianists just proves that you’re a pretentious asshole.”

“That is  _ not  _ the point you asked me to prove.” 

“Yet, here you sit,” she says, playing the opening notes to Für Elise, “proving it.” 

He narrows his eyes, and taps a few keys in a recognizable melody just outside her grasp of thought, and she groans, tapping her foot. “What is that?” she asks, looking at him, feeling like thread unspooling. When he smirks at her, just one corner of his mouth, one of his eyes crinkles up, like a frozen wink in process, and it makes her want to reach out and slip his eyelid closed. 

The notes collide together in a pleasing harmony. “You don’t know it?” he asks, and plays more, keys jangling and fingers dancing across the keyboard and she refuses to admit defeat.

“It doesn’t sound like Mozart,” she says, and he snorts, shaking his head and stopping, withdrawing his hands from the keyboard to look at her sideways with nothing short of dreamlike wonderment. 

“Really, David?”

“What?” she asks, blowing a raspberry and watching his face twist inward, morphing into a frown that has the power to make her wish she could lean forward and kiss it. “It doesn’t.”

“I mean, it’s not, so you’re right.”

“Then why'd you say  _ really, David?”  _ She asks, making her impression of him chipmunk-esque, a squeaky falsetto that earns an eye rolling frown and unwarranted poke to her ribs.

“I don’t sound like that.” 

“Yes, you do,” she argues, adding, “this is the voice you speak with everyday,” in the same tone, rising up on the vowels like a hot air balloon with a cranked up flame.

“My voice is deep and sexy.” 

“In your dreams.”

“In  _ yours,”  _ he corrects, stunning her into a silence he interprets as defeat, and he plays the chorus of Queens  _ We Are the Champions  _ before she smacks a hand over the keys, an action as effective as a director shouting  _ cut!  _

“You really think I dream about you?” she asks, tilting her head, and he looks her in the eye from a downward angle that unintentionally makes butterflies spiral through her stomach. 

“Yeah,” he says, shrugging, “it’s statistically likely that you do, or have—” 

“Have you dreamed about me?” she asks, unable to tether the words to her teeth to prevent them from spilling out, and she tries not to regret it when she sees the cotton candy pink blush spreading up his chest and neck. 

He opens his mouth and closes it and she tries to predict what he will do— scream, vomit, tell her to get out, or something Malibu-risky and kiss her— but instead he chuckles, closes his eyes, taps the keys too softly to make any sound. 

“I…” he starts, then stops, scoffing, and when he opens his eyes again he avoids hers with a purpose, “I can’t say that I haven’t.” 

“What does that mean?” 

“It means I can’t tell you no,” he says, “but I refuse to tell you yes.” 

“You haven’t ever lied to me, yeah?” she asks, and gets a halting, head jerking nod as an answer. Eyes like a rainstorm refuse to meet hers. “Well… don’t start now.” 

He looks at her like she is the deciding force behind all of his big decisions, like she has taken up more space, like she has been of more importance to him than she can ever imagine being. 

She has never thought of herself as someone permanent. If anything, she has felt the opposite: one place in the revolving door of the lives of all the people around her, but the longer she thinks about it, the more permanent Ben seems. 

The more permanent he makes her feel. 

“I guess, like… I don’t know,” he says, shutting the lid over the piano keys like an omen, “I don’t know.” 

“Mixed signals,” Devi whispers, looking at her hands and clenching her jaw, right, until the roof of her mouth begins to ache. 

“I don’t know, Devi,” he says, exasperated, all his planes and angles softened against the light from the moon outside. It is too late for them to be awake, too late for them to be alone together, too late for piano lessons and impermanence and the tug of war drawing out of confessions.

“What do you not know?” she asks, circling a finger over her kneecap and biting back all the horrible things she wants to say— scream, really, until her throat gets hoarse and her voice runs out, until she can sing Janis Joplin with the perfect amount of gravel vibrato— because Ben is too folded in on himself for her to revel in the cruelty.

“I’ve dreamed about you, a few times,” he admits, tapping nervously at the key cover, like he knows which keys are directly under his fingers, like he can see through the cover the way he cannot see through her, “sometimes substantial. Sometimes not.” 

“Substantial?”

“... substantial.” 

“Like-like what?” she asks, terrified to know the answer. To know his definition of substantial. “I don’t really know what substantial means.”

“Limited vocabulary, huh?” he jokes, trying to bring lightness and normalcy and a sense of back and forth that she cannot latch onto. It is almost two AM and piano music has been haunting the hallways of his house for what feels like lifetimes and comedy is not on her mind.

“Ben, I’m being serious,” she whispers, and gets bold, reaching out in a time-slowing movement to cup his cheek in her hand. 

The bone of his jaw falls in line with the small, delicate bones of her pinkie finger and when he sets his jaw too hard, she can feel it press against all of her muscles. 

She smooths her bright blue nail polished thumb along the cut of his cheekbone and his eyes flutter closed. “Talk to me, Ben,” she says— pleads, really, a quiet desperation in her voice that no one has ever called out of her before— and feels it against the pad of her thumb when he inhales, long and deep.

“You’re a constant,” he whispers, tiptoe light, eyes closed, and she realizes that he has pressed his cheek as far into her palm as he can, the Zeno's Paradox space feeling sweat-sticky, “you don’t tempt fate with constants, Devi.”

It is all he really needed to say to break her heart, to shatter the ten million pieces she did not know he held together. “I…” she starts, and stops, pulling her hand away from his skin, and his eyes startle open.

What was it that Phoebe Bridgers sang?  _ Eyes so blue, they looked like weather?  _ Whatever it was, she was right, because Ben looks at her with storm blue eyes, the kind that stirs hurricanes to life in her soul and the rest of the lyrics haunt her:  _ “when she needed me, I wasn’t around/That's the way it goes, it’ll all work out.”  _ and she bites her tongue against all the words she wants to say.

“Okay,” is what she says instead, looking back to the covered piano keys and tapping her fingers over the polished lid, “okay, I guess.”

“You guess?” he asks, an edge to his voice like the precipice of all their past arguments, and she braces herself for the kill shot. “What do you mean you guess?” 

“I mean I’m not gonna fight you, Ben,” she says, too much of her conscious frozen for her to be able to run, “I-I’m tired of fighting you about this.” 

“Devi, I— fighting me about  _ what?”  _ he asks, with a riptide tone, and the fight in her finally flares to life.

“About what we’re doing!” she shouts, explodes, launches an arsenal, “I’m tired of it, and I don’t even know why you bother inviting me over to your place anymore, I just… I don’t understand you.”

There is a set in his jaw when he says, “yes, you do,” and he reaches out, cupping her jaw with the palm of his hand and it feels like he has harnessed fire with his palms.

“How can you think that?” she says, Ben's palm pulling all the fire and all the fight from her skin and her stomach.

“I know you,” he whispers, his other hand rising to her jaw, “you’re- you’re permanent. You’re permanent, Devi. You’re permanent to me.” 

_ As impermanent as we want to believe we are,  _ he had told her, twenty-five minutes ago with his hands against the faux ivory of the piano keys, and she never would have imagined that she is not impermanent to him. 

“I’m permanent to you?” she repeats, a question mark at the end, and he swipes his thumbs over her cheekbones and ducks his head and he is kissing her. 

She gasps into it, eyes slipping closed, one of her hands covering his until he drops it from her jaw to lace their fingers together. 

It is all lips and teeth and tongue, sliding awkward, but it is the best kiss of her life, clumsy and hungry and full of want, full of promise, full of a decade of fights and shouts and broken beakers and Malibu skies and poolside breakfasts and A+ tests, and she never wants this to end. 

_ You’re permanent to me, Devi,  _ he had said, and meant it, sincerity in his eyes and in his voice and the blush high up on his cheeks, and she  _ never wants this to end.  _

Maybe, it never will.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you SO much for reading! If you enjoyed it, leave kudos, and if you really enjoy it, leave a comment, they make my cat respect me and they make me love you for the rest of my life.
> 
> Thank you!


End file.
